7.6.18 How to use google

6.8.18 Discover These Hidden Video Marketing Secrets

It’s no secret that YouTube is ground zero for influencers and lifestyle gurus to launch their brands. Try any search on YouTube, and you’ll see results from people just like you and me – but with one key difference: They have thousands (or even millions) of subscribers waiting for their next video with bated breath.

These YouTube pros have made a name for themselves by capitalizing on their interests. Whether it’s makeup, cars, the latest gadgets, and more – you can find a YouTube influencer for almost any niche interest.

And while we can’t promise you’ll earn millions of video views and endorsement deals from major brands, you can look at what made them successful and translate that to your own channel.

Here are the hidden video marketing secrets you need to steal from the YouTube pros.

1. Create Consistent Branding

YouTubers are excellent at branding. They brand themselves, they brand their channel, and they brand their videos. If you watch enough videos from a specific YouTuber, you start to notice some consistencies. They use similar fonts, colors, and styles in their videos.

You can translate this into your own videos by including your brand assets in your videos. This includes your logo, consistent fonts, your business colors, and more. You can also streamline the look and feel of your videos so they start to become recognizable by your target audience. This applies to your YouTube ads, too. Make sure your ads are branded consistently with your business branding.

2. Do Careful Keyword Research

Successful YouTubers understand the importance of keyword research and getting in front of relevant searchers, they just may go about it a different way. They’re constantly looking for feedback from their viewers – whether it’s what video they want to see next, a specific product they want to hear a review on, or just general feedback about what they like or don’t like about the videos. By crowdsourcing information from their viewers, they’re able to tailor their videos to exactly what users are searching for on YouTube and demonstrate that they really value their viewers’ opinions.

In the same way, your business can research what users in your target audience are looking for on YouTube. Search for your business keywords and see what pops up. Do the top video results have a lot of views? If not, try looking at variations of those keywords so you can determine what relevant videos are registering with your target audience. Then you can look at how those videos have structured their information. Is there a pattern to the way their title is listed? Do they include a lot of information in the video description? You obviously don’t want to steal their exact titles or content, but you can look at structuring yours similarly.

3. Connect with Your Audience

One of the reasons users love YouTube is because they feel connected to the people in the videos they’re watching. You probably trust a seemingly unbiased YouTube review over a testimonial on a business’s website, right? YouTube influencers connect with their audiences. Like I mentioned earlier, they seek their feedback. They also connect with them on other social media sites and share information about themselves that makes them seem more relatable.

You want to connect with your audience by humanizing your business, sharing information on other social media sites, and encouraging engagement. Ask your viewers what they want to see from you, and then deliver on that. The more engaging your videos are, the more likely people will be to revisit your channel.

4. Be Authentic

One of the things that sets the YouTube pros apart from the YouTube wannabes is an authenticity that translates to viewers. You can tell when someone isn’t being genuine, and you likely won’t connect with them.

YouTube and video marketing, in general, gives your business the opportunity to really showcase itself to your target market. By portraying the authenticity of your business, you can stand apart from your competitors. Think about it: Is a consumer going to want to visit the big chain tire repair shop or the local business that gets involved in the community and shares helpful tire safety tips? I know I’d prefer to visit the business that has an interest in helping me.

As the second largest search engine in the world, we know that YouTube is an important place to establish a presence for your business. And, the way your business looks on YouTube can be helpful in getting new customers, especially if you pair your organic YouTube channel strategy with a YouTube advertising approach. Learn more about YouTube advertising on our website, and contact us to get started today at www.onlineadvertisingcincinnati.com .

2.2.18 Kill Your Slow Season with Targeted Email Marketing

Winter is making its presence known, and you may notice a decrease in customer inquiries and appointments as a result. Don’t fret, as your business is not the only one facing a slower season.

As the winter storms roll-in, what can set your business apart from the others is how your team utilizes this new found bandwidth. Right now is the perfect time to launch a thoughtful email marketing campaign.

When it comes to launching an impactful email marketing campaign, it helps to have a plan in place.

Here are some tips for a successful email campaign so your business can keep customer interest warm even while the temperatures outside stay cool!

Determine Your Message

We recommend taking sufficient time to outline the reason you want to contact current customers and/or potential customers. Clarity in purpose will likely lead to better results!

Are you interested in highlighting a special promotion, encouraging customers to like your social media pages or sharing fun photos of the team? This core marketing goal will help determine other aspects of your campaign.

Additionally, think about your sales goals for the season, quarter, or year. How many customer leads do you need to meet those goals?

Choose Your Audience

Let’s assume you’ve identified a specific message, which aims to achieve a specific goal. The next step is choosing an audience that will be receptive to your message.

Hopefully, your team has diligently entered customer and prospect information over the last nine to 10 months into a lead management tool. If not, an online marketing company can curate a list of contacts that could be highly interested in your services.

We’ll get this out of the way early: we don’t recommend targeting everyone in the Rolodex for an email campaign. A tailored message requires a tailored audience.

For example, if the goal is to drive more online reviews on Google and Facebook, consider a segment that meets the following criteria:

Recently purchased a product or service

Provided positive feedback (via a feedback card, email or phone)

Been a customer for at least one year

Choosing the right audience is essential to the success of your email marketing campaign.

Deliver Fresh Content

Go for a fun, personal tone for the content of your message. Loosen up on the industry jargon. Your “fresh take” starts with the email subject line. Aim to achieve a few things with the subject line:

Evaluate the Results

Are you evaluating open rate, link clicks, online purchases, or landing page form submissions? Maybe something else? If you’re partnering with a marketing agency, you don’t actually need to get bogged down with deciphering and compiling results – the marketing company will sift through the data on your behalf. They can share powerful insights, plus potential next steps.

1.24.18 Local Search Advertising Tips you need to know

With the new year in full swing, it’s time to take a fresh new look at your 2018 marketing strategy. Whether you’re a local business or a national brand, your marketing plan for this year should definitely include paid search advertising. Paid search can get complicated, and with everything going on this time of year, reevaluating your digital strategy can seem overwhelming. So, we’ve taken it back to the basics of paid search so you can make sure you’re starting the year off on a good note.

1. Keywords Are Key

Keywords are the core of paid search. It’s extremely important to consistently research which keywords your customers are using (at least quarterly). By creating and updating your keyword list, it will increase your chances of appearing in search results. For local businesses, it’s especially important to include location-based keywords so you can increase your chances of your ads showing to local searchers. If you’re a plumber in Dallas, make sure to add “near me” and “Dallas” to your keyword list.

Tip: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What are your customers actually searching for? Don’t think about what you want them to search for. Think about the solutions you provide for them.

2. Know the Importance of Your Quality Score

Google assigns each business a Quality Score on a scale of 1-10. Your score is based on a Google algorithm that reflects a customer’s experience with your ad. Google takes into account a variety of information, including how relevant your landing page is to your text ad.

A good Quality Score is important to your campaign because it affects your Ad Rank. A higher Quality Score typically means higher placement on the search engine results page and decreased cost per click.

Tip:Your score is based on a customer’s experience across all devices, including mobile. Make sure that your paid search campaigns are optimized for desktop and mobile, which leads us to our next point.

3. Create a Plan for Mobile

Almost 60% of search queries come from mobile devices. So, if your website and landing pages aren’t optimized for both mobile and desktop, you could be missing out on a lot of business. Not only should your website be mobile friendly, but it should be easy for searchers to contact you on all devices. Whether it’s having chat available for desktop users or click-to-call for mobile searchers, make sure the experience customers are having with your search ads are smooth and easy for all devices.

Tip: Check your advertisements and website on a mobile device or through a tool to test that you’re providing a seamless experience for your customers.

4. Track & Manage Leads

The main purpose for running paid search is to get more customers, so don’t let your new leads fall by the wayside. Pay attention to the leads you’re receiving and how many are converting, and also make sure you’re driving the right type of customer to your business. If you’re not converting many of the leads you’re driving, then you should readdress your lead management process or your keyword research.

Tip: Find a lead management system for your business and create a simple, but effective process for your staff to follow up with those leads.

5. Back Up Your Paid Strategy with an Organic One

Did you know that you can receive up to 89% more clicks to your website when both your paid ad and organic listing appear on page one of the search engine results page? SEO pairs well with paid search, so make sure you take your keyword research and apply it to your overall marketing content strategy, no matter whether it’s paid or organic. Updating your website and landing pages to reflect your findings may boost the ROI of your search campaigns.

Tip: You can look at the keywords that are driving organic visits to your website and incorporate those into your paid search strategy. 50% of potential sales are lost because consumers can’t find the information they are looking for. You’ve already done your keyword research, so you know what your potential customers are searching for. Now make sure to create landing pages to meet those needs.

Use these five guidelines as a checklist for reevaluating your paid search strategy this year. Make sure to keep the basics in mind and take a fresh look at your campaigns on a quarterly basis to continue to stay relevant. And, if this sounds like a lot to keep up with, don’t hesitate to find a digital marketing company that can help you run and optimize paid search campaigns. Learn more on our website.

1.22.18 Facebook's latest news feed update

What Facebook’s Latest News Feed Update Really Means for Businesses

Facebook’s unexpected announcement on January 11, 2018, about the way it will soon display content within the News Feed sent media agencies and businesses into a tailspin. But what does this change actually mean, and will it really impact businesses?

What Does this Change Mean for Your Content?

In short, Facebook’s News Feed update will favor posts from people instead of brands, and posts with comments and shares are more likely to appear in News Feeds than posts with reactions (i.e. likes) alone.

In filtering out this type of content, Facebook sets its sights on its original purpose: social media, in which users participate in meaningful interactions with other users.

But this update raises the question of what the future holds for businesses who market themselves through Facebook posts. Many brands and businesses rely on Facebook as a communication channel to make announcements and stay in touch with their fans and followers.

With Facebook’s updated algorithm favoring users over brands, it is imperative that your social media strategy focuses on quality content and community management to continue to reach your audience on Facebook.

What to Do to Stay Relevant on Facebook

Now more than ever, it is crucial to create visual, meaningful, relateable, original, and polished content in an effort to connect with page followers. Businesses must also be cognizant of the fact that Facebook users determine what is noteworthy and shareable, and pages must publish and promote content with user preferences – as opposed to brand interests – in mind. Remember that good social media content earns shares and comments, which in turn, earns the favor of Facebook’s algorithm, meaning posts will be more visible on News Feeds.

With Facebook’s recent preference for interactions between users, community management should be a cornerstone of your social media strategy. Businesses now, more than ever, need to respond to comments, mentions, and messages from page followers. Facebook will look at these interactions when determining what content to show in the News Feed.

It’s worth noting that Facebook ads are not directly affected by this update. So, by advertising your business on Facebook, you’re increasing your chances of reaching a large portion of your target audience beyond your followers and across the social site and its extended network. And, coupling the aforementioned community management strategies within ad management can lead to improved page performance.

Your Future on Facebook

As Facebook continues to revise its algorithm, businesses must keep flexible, creative, and user-oriented social media practices in mind. Remember to show the human side of your brand to connect with your followers, which not only agrees with Facebook’s algorithm but also leads to the start of a meaningful client-business relationship.

1.18.18 Search & Display Advertising: What’s the Difference?

1.11.18 The Rise of OTT

The Rise of Over The Top Television

OTT has become the buzzword du jour in recent months, not only because it offers an entirely new way to consume digital content, but also because it represents the marriage of traditional television and online video. For the uninitiated, OTT stands for “Over-the-top,” a phrase that refers to the method by which video-based content is delivered to users. Instead of going the traditional (a.k.a. “linear”) route – i.e., content delivery through cable/satellite TV gatekeepers such as Comcast or Spectrum – OTT essentially piggybacks on a user’s broadband connection to deliver digital video content directly to users via the Internet.

Chances are you’ve already interacted with OTT through popular streaming TV services such as Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Video, all of which deliver video content over the same broadband connection that you would use for surfing the Web or checking your email. The success of these streaming services indicates a seismic shift in how consumers engage with video content, and for the astute digital marketer, the emergence of OTT represents a gold mine of opportunity when it comes to audience targeting capabilities.

So is an investment in OTT-specific advertising platforms worth it? Let’s take a look at some of the interesting developments taking place in terms of linear TV viewership among various age groups, as it reveals the burgeoning influence that OTT is exerting upon viewing habits across target demographics.

TV Viewing Habits by Age Group

In terms of audience age groups, recent data published by Nielsen reveals a sharp decline in traditional TV viewing by younger audiences; in fact, teens and younger Millennials (ages 18-24) are watching 40% less traditional TV than they were 5 years ago, and viewing time among older Millennials (ages 25-34) has fallen by 25% in that same time frame as well. But this decline has not been limited to the younger audiences – according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report, traditional TV viewing time among Gen Xers (ages 35-49) has contracted by 13% as well, while it remained relatively flat among adults aged 50-64. For the older Baby Boomers (ages 65 and up), traditional TV watch time has actually increased by over 7% in the past 5 years, indicating that declines in linear TV viewing tend to taper off with each successive age bracket.

While the value of each demographic is a topic that is constantly up for debate among marketers, it’s safe to say that consumers of digital video content are the focus of most advertising budgets today for a number of important reasons:

All OTT devices are assigned a unique device ID, giving advertisers the ability to target users by this metric in OTT environments. This paves the way for more specific targeting capabilities including cross-device household targeting.

When purchasing OTT inventory, advertisers and media buyers can take advantage of various parameters supplied by demand-side platforms including device type, day parting, channel, geolocation, and even show genre. Even in the past three months, advances have been made that enable advertisers to get “hyper-local” with their targeting.

Several third-party audience measurement providers – including heavy-hitters such as Nielsen and ComScore – are delving further into audience measurement solutions that are specific to OTT environments, providing marketers with more robust tools to help facilitate effective ad buys.

OTT vs. Linear TV: The Audience Targeting Advantage

One of the most important distinctions to make between linear TV and OTT is the fact that when you advertise via linear TV, you typically target a show because of the audience you think is watching, while with OTT, you target individuals no matter what they’re watching. This subtle but hugely significant difference is one of the main reasons why OTT-specific advertising is heating up across the board, as marketers look to take advantage of the many benefits that this unique and versatile platform has to offer.

1.1.18 digital myths debunked

10 Common Myths About Digital Marketing Debunked

Ever since marketing has turned global, crossing the borders of countries and nations, it paved the way for marketing through digital media. That’s how Digital Marketing saw its heyday. Technically, digital marketing has been around for about two decades. And just like all things wonderful, some features of it are shrouded in myth and misconceptions.

These misconceptions and myths are mostly preached and perpetrated by distractors and unschooled people. These perpetrators can do no good other than ruining your motivation and misguiding you. So if you really want to get some solid result from your digital marketing efforts, you need to debunk these myths and dispell them once and for all. Let’s debunk some myths that hold you back from doing your digital marketing right.

Myth #1: SEO is Dead
Nothing can be more untrue than this. SEO is no way dead, rather it is evolving with each passing day. With all the Penguins, Panda, RankBrain, Pigeon and Hummingbird, Google is setting the standards of SEO too high. It goes without saying the SEO is evolving at a steady pace. It is very much relevant to boost your website higher in the rankings when done correctly.

So stop on paying heed to any such kind of myth. Focus on meta tag descriptions, using keywords in the URL to make your website come towards the top of the search results.

Myth #2: More, More and More Traffic
Traffic is important, no doubt; but what’s more important is getting the right traffic. There is no doubt that more traffic means more leads and conversions. But the prime purpose of real digital marketing is not to bring maximum traffic, but to bring well-targeted traffic. What’s the use of 2000 random visitors, when only 5 of them actually convert? Isn’t it better to get 200 visitors, but get 30 of them as actual leads?

This is why you must thoroughly research the demography of your targeted group and understand their exact requirements, and how you can tap into it. It is far better to get a mention in a small website within your niche, than to get mentioned in a website with a bigger audience, but outside of your niche.

Myth #3: Social Media only clicks for few Industries
Totally untrue. Social media is such a platform that is all about connecting with your customers, creating a buzz about your brand, and engaging your audience to your brand. And it can be a powerful and highly effective tool for any industry, regardless of any nature of business.

For e.g., just as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are good for B2B companies, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and again Facebook, works for a B2C retailer. Strategic implementation of social media marketing can provide tremendous ROI.

You just need to find the right social network that suits your business.

Myth #4: Just Create a Website, and you are done!
Just no! If you have a website that was created and updated several years ago, then you will be lagging way back. Because online marketing arena is constantly evolving and naturally people expect the latest features, functionalities and information from your website.

So a website with no interaction, no video on the homepage, not responsive, and having entirely static content won’t appeal much to the visitors. That being said, your work doesn’t end by just getting your website created. You need to furnish it with added functionalities and features.

Myth #5: Digital Marketing is only for Techies/Engineers
Absolutely false. Anyone in the field of Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, and who’s interested in getting connected to their fans and target audience, can do digital marketing with a little bit training. Digital marketing is no rocket science, so you need not be a hardcore technical person or an engineer for it.

Just stay aware of the latest trends and features, stay informed about Facebook, Twitter, Googele+, Analytics, SEO, and your job is done.

Myth #6: Have a Profile on all the Social Media Platforms!
Indeed, social media has become a very powerful medium and can push your brand forward. But you must be calculative and judicious enough as to which platform you should choose. Because if your target audience is high tech professional, then, of course, Snapchat isn’t the best place for you. In that case, you may try your luck in LinkedIn.

Don’t think that you need to have accounts on all the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Snapchat, Vine, Instagram. Just think which platform would work best for your business. Choose maximum 3-4 platforms; and not all those out there.

Myth #7: My Industry isn’t capable to Interest People Online
Your product may be related to plumbing. Now if you think why is it important to put out relevant contents and be consistent on social media, or update your website, then you are wrong. Because if you do these, when your potential customers would need a plumber, your name would come at the top of their search results.

So don’t ever think that your business isn’t buzz worthy!

Myth #8: Digital Marketing is only for Large-Scale Business
On the contrary, any business, be large-scale or small-scale, can do digital marketing based on their goals and objectives. Rather small-scale businesses and start-ups should all the more engage in going digital. Because that is the only way to create a buzz, raise awareness for the products and services, and put an effort in SEO.

To be honest, any business can go digital based on what they aim to get out of it.

Myth #9: Constantly Re-design your Website
False. You don’t need to redesign your website now and then. You just need to test sales pages to see if there is a need to redesign. Preferably when you need to boost up your sales, to give your website an SEO reshape, or to keep pace with the latest trends.

To make your effort easy and simple, just keep adding fresh and quality content to your website on a regular basis, instead of completely redesigning or revamping it.

#10: My Competitors are not in Digital Marketing, why should I bother?
On the contrary, you should all the more take advantage of this and engage in digital marketing. Your competitors are surely losing a chunk of potential customers by their wrong moves. Why should you follow their footsteps? Go Digital, and gain more traffic, more conversion, and more revenue.

So don’t always believe everything that people tell you about digital marketing. Half of them take it as just another way of selling products and services. But digital marketing is more than that.